Apparently I am running a charity to supply medicines to the impoverished National Health Service. My wholesaler has just written to inform me that our discounts have been reduced to 2.5 per cent under the level of our clawback; in other words we will lose 2.5 per cent on every medicine we supply which is made by more than half a dozen manufacturers.

This is simply unsustainable under current market conditions. Manufacturers are passing higher costs onto their customers and yet the Department of Health still seems to think we are making ‘excessive’ profit. The truth is that now the supply of branded medicines has become a loss making activity, and while we may be told that higher purchase profits on generics more than balance this loss we have to remember that every pharmacy will be affected differently depending on its dispensing mix. Our basket of goods is heavy on branded goods, which although prescribed generically to tick the PCT’s boxes still require us to supply a loss incurring medicine.

It is a shame that the impact of independent contractors on drug prices is not properly recognised; because of the keen competition to get the best price we have driven down the cost of medicines to the NHS by huge sums of money. The introduction of parallel importing in the 1990s alone must have saved the taxpayer hundreds of millions of pounds because it has kept the prices that pharma can charge competitive with other European markets. Something has to be done.